Cradle Will Rock's thesis was right: Modern Art was a CIA weapon
OW
The Cradle Will Rock's thesis was correct:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
Alex Fraser: Assuming we are speaking of Tim Robbins' movie, and not
Orson Welles' original screenplay, you are right on the money, Tony,
except I would suggest that the analogy is turned on its ear, like an
abstract painting! It used to be said that "commerce follows the
flag." In the 20th Century, influenced by the tradition of The Yankee
Trader, the process began to reverse.
The thesis of CRADLE WILL ROCK is that by destroying the WPA's goal to
bring Art to ordinary people, a young Nelson Rockefeller, and
latterly, a group older tycoons like William Randolph Hearst, turned
pictorial Art (at least) -- once the playground of aristocrats,
wealthy aesthetes, and pontiffs -- into a commodity, a product to be
consigned to utilitarian puposes, and for profit in the mass market,
like any other.
Once "Modern Art" had been used to sell toothpaste or booze, or to
decorate the lobby of banks (as Rockefeller had hoped to), why not use
such arcane stuff, full of mixed messages, to press the Cold War --
which we now know was largely a crock? If Russia championed the staid
"Soviet Realism," the CIA would push "Modern Art's" twisting of
traditional forms as evidence of American freedom -- even if the
average American hated the stuff, and today (would be my guess),
though inured to it, largely tries to ignore it.
CRADLE WILL ROCK, though it doesn't give Welles or John Houseman much
credit, celebrates a time when a group of artists, like those who came
to form The Mercury Theater, defied both government and commerce in an
attempt to bring a more humanistic, accessible art to the American
public.
Here, you may recall, Tony, is my review (updated for The Red
Room.com) of CRADLE WILL ROCK, just before it was first shown in
theaters:
OW
HEARST: What in God's name were you expecting from a communist?
ROCKEFELLER: I would never have had this problem with Picasso or
Matisse.
HEARST: We control the future of art because we pay for the future of
art. Appoint people to your museum boards who detest the Riveras of
this world. Celebrate the Matisses. Create the next wave of art. If
you have the purse strings, you have the power.
ROCKEFELLER: Cultural power, to pay for Matisse.
HEARST: Celebrate colors, celebrate form. Portraits, countrysides, men
on horses, sunsets, nudes...Fund a new wave of art. A travelling
exhibit throughout Europe, highlighting American artists. Non-
political.
ROCKEFELLER: Yes, abstract colors and forms, not politics.
HEARST: My papers will hail it as the next big thing. We'll canonize
the artists, make them rich. And soon enough, all artists will be
doing the next new thing.
ROCKEFLLER: But there's something about artists that always gets
socially concerned.
HEARST: They won't get paid for that.
ROCKEFELLER: And they won't be seen. They'll have no influence. Rather
then starve, they'll adapt. It's survival.
HEARST: And artists are whores, like the rest of us.
OW
Robbins movie I was referring to whose main flaw is the treatment of
Welles and Houseman as well as the significance of The Mercury
Theatre. However, we now know that abstract expressionism (also used
to destroy the social traditions of New Deal Art) was used as an
ideological weapon by the CIA.
AF: Absolutely, Tony. And what do you think are the chances right
today for the existence of a U.S. Intelligence office, several
probably, devoted to manipulating entertainment/news media and
whatever passes for avant garde Art today? If such subterfuge worked
before, they will be trying it again.
TW: It is definitely going on and that is why I see the relevance of a
class offered again in Foreign Language shere on Nazi Cinema subtitled
"The Manipulation of Mass Culture." It is going on in Murdoch's Fox
Corporation as well as Hollywood studios now under the thrall of
corporate dominance. You may want to look up David Walsh's lecture at
Salford University UK last month that appeared in yesterday's
wsws.org:
David Walsh on Socialism and Cinema
Arts editor David Walsh spoke October 25 on “Socialism and Cinema,” at
the University of Salford in the Greater Manchester area in the UK, as
part of the “Screens and Meditations” series. We are posting an edited
version of the talk.
“Socialism and Cinema” is a rather general title for a meeting, but a
provocative one, and meant to be provocative. There is ample reason to
be dissatisfied with the films currently offered to us. It was a
terrible summer for movies in the US, by and large—in some ways worse
than ever.
The title of this talk has at least two meanings, or it points in two
historical directions. In the first place, we are arguing that the
best film work in the past—including at the US studios—was
inconceivable without the powerful presence of socialist ideas and a
socialist movement.
And, second, we assert there will be no serious revival of global
cinema until there is again such a presence and influence, and, in
fact, the emergence of a consciously socialist and revolutionary
tendency in filmmaking and criticism.
The first point can be proven empirically, in the histories of
national cinemas and biographies of individual filmmakers. I do not
propose to go into that extensively today.
At York University in Toronto in Jan 2007 I attempted, in a
preliminary way, to present a brief history of filmmaking from the
point of view of the indispensability of left-wing influence,
specifically on Hollywood. (See “Film, history and socialism” Part One
and Part Two )
One could point to the European émigrés in Hollywood in the pre-World
War II period, some of them politically left-wing, others not, but all
the products of cultural life in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and other
European cities, where the socialist workers movement played a central
role and where the experience and example of the Russian Revolution
(along with the defeated German and Hungarian Revolutions) carried
extraordinary weight. We are not referring simply to directors, but
performers, cinematographers, composers, designers, and so on. This
helps account for the texture, the depth of the studio films at the
time.
In terms of developments in the US itself, the shattering impact of
the Depression, along with the dangers posed by the rise of fascism in
Europe, radicalized artists and intellectuals. The Communist Party
gained considerable influence in the film industry. By the time of
World War II, for example, some 25 to 30 percent of the most regularly
employed writers at the studios were CP members. Of course, the Party
by this time was a thoroughly Stalinized organization, but nonetheless
the writers’ affiliation provides some indication of the leftward
movement of this layer.
Among actors, of course, two writers on “Radical Hollywood,” Paul
Buhle and Dave Wagner, comment that the FBI believed that “Lucille
Ball, Katharine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey
Bogart, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, Bette Davis, Lloyd Bridges, John
Garfield, Anne Revere, Larry Parks, some of Hollywood’s highest-paid
writers, and for that matter the wives of March and Gene Kelly, along
with Gregory Peck’s fiancée, [were] all in or close to the party.”
There were many others. Edward G. Robinson met Trotsky in Mexico City,
through his contact with the painter Diego Rivera.
Film directors in and around the Communist Party included Abraham
Polonsky, Nicholas Ray, Joseph Losey, Elia Kazan, Robert Rossen, Jules
Dassin, John Berry, Martin Ritt, Edward Dmytryk and others. Perhaps
the three greatest figures of the American cinema—Chaplin, John Ford
and Orson Welles—were all, one way or another, men of the left. John
Huston was another …
The anticommunist purges had a devastating impact on Hollywood and
American cultural life as a whole, with consequences we still live
with today. As we have frequently noted, left-wing thought was
essentially criminalized and made illegitimate, in an effort jointly
undertaken by the extreme right, the forces of the state and American
liberalism. Liberalism’s pact with the anti-communist devil in the
postwar period meant its demise as a force in any way identified with
social progress.
I asserted in that 2007 presentation in Toronto that the last two
decades had been the weakest in film history, not because the spark of
human genius had gone out, but for reasons bound up, above all, with
problems in social development. These problems have had a particular
impact in the area of politics and art, especially film, drama and
literature, where an understanding of historical laws and social
processes plays so large a part.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the end of
socialism, and the decay or collapse of the traditional labor
organizations had an enormous impact on the intellectuals and artists
in the 1990s and beyond—a considerable section of the upper middle
class “left” shifted to the right, turned its back on social problems,
enriching itself, concentrating in film on its own trivial activities.
We argue that all serious art contains the element of protest, direct
or indirect, against the conditions of life, and that all serious
criticism of social life gravitates toward Marxism—not postmodernism
or “Western Marxism,” but genuine Marxism, based on the working class.
A decline in the influence of Marxism, the result primarily of
Stalinism and its crimes, the eventual demise of the USSR, and the
barrage of anticommunism, helped produce a decline in critical thought
and work, a temporary cultural regression. It is not accidental that
the falling off in filmmaking, one of the most socially communicative
art forms, coincided with a low point in social struggle—certainly in
the US, with strike activity in recent years reaching low levels
without precedent in the modern era. Major strike activity has
declined in the US almost to zero, statistically speaking.
Here we are in 2010. Our situation contradicts the superficial
impressionists and right-wing ideologues. History did not end in 1991,
as it turned out—indeed it has become especially lively since
September 2008 and the near collapse of the world financial system,
which has produced economic hardship unseen since the Depression.
In the US, there are 25 million unemployed or involuntarily working
part-time; more than 1 million individuals or families will lose their
homes this year. There has been an extraordinary growth in poverty. In
the state of Michigan, once the center of the auto industry, household
income declined 21 percent during the past decade, a staggering
decline, especially when you consider the very rich are richer than
ever—we are inflicted with more billionaires now than in 2006.
Estimates put the real number of those living in poverty in the US,
those unable to make ends meet, at 80 million to 100 million people.
People feel deep, deep fury at the banks, Wall Street, the
politicians. There is no popular language too strong for the bankers.
And the Barack Obama phenomenon has proven to be a political mirage,
an utter fraud. The American ruling elite made a tactical shift with
Obama, who has carried out policies—the bank bailout, the prosecution
of colonial wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a cold
indifference to the growth of poverty and unemployment—every bit as
rotten and reactionary as his predecessor. Which is why the Democrats
are likely to lose the upcoming election on November 2. This is not
because there is some shift to the right going on in the US—on the
contrary—but because there are two big business parties and under the
present political system protest against the ruling party can only be
expressed by sitting at home or voting for the other swine, both of
which are likely to happen in this case.
The banks were bailed out globally to the tune of trillions of
dollars, and now that has to be carved out of the hide of the
population, through austerity measures, savage cuts in social
spending. This is a universal phenomenon. The initial stage of working
class response has resulted in mass protest in Greece, Spain and now
France. The same is inevitable in this country, on a vast scale, in
response to the unprecedented cuts proposed by the Conservative-
Liberal Democrat coalition government. There may be much confusion—and
the working class here is saddled with unions and leaderships who,
despite paying occasional lip service to opposition, agree with the
major parties that British capitalism has to be made competitive and
the banking system stabilized by wiping out half a century or more of
working class gains—but these measures will, in the end, precipitate
social upheaval.
So when we begin to discuss any of the questions involved with our
subject this evening, we are mindful of these facts. We are not
floating in empty space, but working and thinking in a definite set of
circumstances, on the eve of social upheavals on a global scale.
Should that have an influence on filmmakers and filmmaking? Yes, I
believe it should. We believe intellectuals and artists, if they want
their work to dig deeply into things and make a powerful impact,
however they translate this reality into their aesthetic language and
means, will have to take the character of the epoch as a starting
point: an epoch of sharp shifts, shocks and upheavals.
I think there is another side to it: the emergence of mass movements
against capitalism, including and perhaps especially in the US, will
begin to dissipate much of the global skepticism and pessimism. This
will generate a quite different social atmosphere, a different
artistic climate than the one that has prevailed for the past 30 years
in particular. Such a movement will not solve all the problems, but it
will make the problems much more solvable, it will put many things
into perspective. Much that seems impossible or fantastic at the moment
—in terms of audiences for more serious work, means of publicizing and
distributing such work, the reemergence of more substantial and
searching art itself—will prove to be within our grasp. This is not to
paint pretty pictures, immense challenges are also bound up with a
period of social struggle, but the challenges will be more interesting
than most of the recent ones.
I would prefer to concentrate today, as I’ve probably already
indicated, not so much on the history of cinema and this history of
left-wing influence, but on the need for more critical filmmaking in
our day, including the development of a consciously socialist current.
One could argue, I think, given the crying conditions in which the
vast majority of the world’s population lives and the threats
(economic, military, ecological) to humanity that the continued
existence of capitalism represents, that it seems high time opposition
to the status quo became more widespread among film artists. It
doesn’t seem unreasonable given the historic failure of capitalism to
suggest that one of the most powerful and popular art forms, an art
form entirely bound up with the vicissitudes of the 20th century,
should align itself more thoughtfully and compassionately with the way
life actually is.
Nor does it seem unreasonable to say to the self-centered layers who
have dominated the film world for the past several decades in
particular: Enough about you! We would like to see a bit more of the
world, we would like to see something aside from these superficial and
not very edifying pictures of yourselves—I don’t think it’s too much
to ask.
Of course, life is far more complex than that. The transition to a
richer cinema will not take place automatically, because it is
‘historically overdue,’ or as the result of somewhat formal arguments,
as reasonable as they may be. We are dealing with enormously complex
processes: the relation between the artistic imagination and social
reality, the inevitable lag between social reality and its reflection
in thinking in general, the specific difficulties presented by the
past decades of political life, the legacy of anticommunism, the role
of various ideologies (especially prevalent on university campuses and
among intellectuals) parading as Marxism, etc. And there is the not
insignificant issue of the ownership of the media and film industry,
especially in the US, by a handful of giant conglomerates. But the
effort has to be undertaken. It has to be fought for.
In the US we tend to be saddled at the moment with either stupid and
forgettable blockbusters; Quentin Tarantino and his imitators,
including the porno-sadistic element, who are helping to inure the
population to brutality and cruelty; the self-indulgent efforts of
‘independent’ filmmakers, who haven’t lived through or understood
much; ‘small-bore,’ passive realism; or slight character studies that
do not stick in the memory. Writing for television is sometimes more
interesting at the moment—with all their limitations, series such as
The Wire, Mad Men, Hung, etc., seem to bear a greater resemblance to
life than most film efforts.
There are obviously sincere and serious people at work at present. It
is generally an encouraging experience to attend the Toronto film
festival, for example, which I’ve been doing now for 17 years on
behalf of the World Socialist Web Site or its predecessors.
We always or nearly always encounter a number of serious films and
filmmakers in Toronto. I have been surprised and pleased at times—
given the generally poisonous ideological atmosphere—by the fact that
there are still a considerable number of people who are using their
brains, who feel something for human difficulties, who are not swept
away by the dominant social indifference. And that number will only
grow.
This year we saw and commented on a number of interesting works, from
the US, from here, from Norway, from Spain, from Kyrgyzstan, from
South Korea, from Iran.
As we wrote: “The more serious film writers, directors, producers and
performers see and feel the impact of certain things: the global
financial crisis, the deteriorating conditions of life for tens of
millions, the vast social fissures that have opened up everywhere, the
general hypocrisy and hatefulness of those in power, the ongoing
neocolonial wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.…
“These phenomena and their interconnections are not yet understood at
a highly conscious level, nor is a political and social alternative
grasped by a great many, but the development of the world is
inevitably making itself felt. To absorb the truth of the world and
express it in images, to find the most artistic means of coming to
terms with life—this remains the ‘most difficult inner labor’ for the
filmmaker.”
We spoke to a number of directors and writers, including director Ken
Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty: the latter conversation raised a
host of interesting questions. I think Loach is a serious figure, a
limited figure, but someone who has maintained his principles.
Ken Loach learned something from the Trotskyist movement: a confidence
in the working class, the understanding that Stalinism was the
opposite of socialism and that the socialist transformation of society
was necessary to prevent catastrophe. But this didn’t solve all his
problems. He has been isolated, many “lefts” of his generation
deserted, the younger generations expressed little interest for some
time. To be fair, his artistic limitations are also a product in part
of this isolation and these unfavorable conditions.
At the same time, the influence of Trotskyism among the intellectuals
here—a legacy of the efforts of Gerry Healy and the Socialist Labour
League in the late 1960s and early 1970s—meant that when the collapse
of the USSR and Stalinism came in 1989-91, the former didn’t simply
fall to pieces, because they had learned that Stalinism was the enemy
of socialism. That’s one of the reasons why you have had generally
left-wing figures continue to work here, while elsewhere in Europe we
have seen almost the virtual collapse of such filmmaking.
One of our pieces on the Toronto film festival was headlined “Walking
around and near the problems,” which comes from an essay by the Soviet
literary critic Aleksandr Voronsky, a Bolshevik, an adherent of the
Left Opposition, who was murdered in the Stalinist purges in 1937.
Voronsky spoke about artists approaching reality, but drawing away in
fear, or overwhelmed by the difficulty of looking life straight in the
face.
I think the comment has a bearing on our current circumstances. A
growing awareness exists about the massive human crisis, expressed by
so many developments: the economic suffering, the consequences of
neocolonial war or communalist conflicts, the conditions facing
refugees and immigrants, the physical and psychological harshness of
everyday life for so many, the brutality and indifference of the
authorities, the deep sense of alienation from all existing
institutions and authorities—without a grasp as of yet of or
confidence in any viable alternative.
The development of the world determines the development of art—but
this is a highly contradictory determination, mediated by many
historical and social factors.
What holds back a more direct engagement by film writers and directors
with the world, at least the world as it is experienced by the great
majority of the population? I want to emphasize no one is attempting
to limit the territory that the artist can explore—the life of the
middle classes, including the upper middle classes, is an entirely
legitimate subject. The problem is that the films about these social
layers are not profound, or honest.
Make films about anything, the most personal matters, or the most
socially sweeping, but make them with deep feeling and commitment,
with precision, and elegance, and knowledge, and if you leave out the
quality of our life at this point, the specific character of our
historical moment and dilemmas, even your most lyrical efforts will be
devoid of substance.
It is one of the signs of intellectual regression in our day that
artists, encouraged by swarms of “left” ideologues, believe they can
(or perhaps even should!) avoid economic conditions, the conditions of
everyday life, changes in social life, when they consider the
relations between individuals, including at the most intimate level.
The detail is everything, the broader picture is nothing.
In my view, such notions have had the most pernicious consequences for
art. To consider emotional life, psychic life, sexual life held quite
apart from history and social development qualitatively falsifies the
human condition. It makes accurate portraits of life impossible. It is
a regression, frankly, in terms of the development of film and
literature itself. And this ‘holding apart’ is even made into a
program!
“Identity politics,” the concentration on various gender or racial
issues, has had dreadful consequences for art and film as well. Such
views are damaging aesthetically because they are false: the world is
not divided along sexual or ethnic lines. The picture established on
the basis of such positions is an inevitably inaccurate and distorted
one, aesthetically unpleasing and incapable of fully engaging us. A
false idea “cannot find a perfected form, i.e., cannot aesthetically
move us in a profound manner,” as Aleksandr Voronsky noted, following
Plekhanov and others.
Identity politics encourages the striving for privileges by layers of
the middle class, and it breeds self-involvement, narcissism, self-
pity. Art demands absolute sincerity and honesty, and some
considerable degree of objectivity, or at least the ability to get
oneself out of the way during the process of creation. To begin (and
often end!) in art with one’s own ‘life and hard times’ is a poor and
unreliable method of work.
Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Edith
Wharton and others examined the world, as well as their place in it,
with an extraordinarily clear and unflinching gaze and, on that basis,
produced indelible work. There is nothing comparable in the recent
period, changing what must be changed, and for definite political and
ideological reasons.
Every aspect of life needs to be treated, but seriously, evocatively
treated. Trotsky speaks about the artist needing a “definite feeling
for the world”: i.e., not to evade life, or ignore it, or elevate
oneself above it, but to accept life and reality as the basis for art.
Not to accept the existing social organism, but to accept our life of
three dimensions as the basis for filmmaking, and to explore all sides
of it, relentlessly, freely, honestly.
This presupposes, and this is a breathtaking presupposition on many
university campuses at present, that our subjective sensations have,
or can have, an objective significance, that we cognize an objective
world independent of us.
What, as I say, are the principal obstacles to richer, more complex
work? Human beings have not lost the spark of genius—we see in it
technology, medicine, science in general, with their astonishing
advances. We still have eyes, ears, brains—the difficulties are
primarily of a social and historical character: traumas, betrayals,
disappointments bound up with setbacks to the cause of world social
revolution and the crimes of Stalinism, the discrediting of socialism
in the eyes of millions. Generations of artists were disillusioned,
discouraged, their perspective narrowed and stunted. The artist is
told that a concern for social life and the fate of the population has
been tried and failed. ‘Good-bye to all that.’
And of course there was real reason for concern on the part of the
artists: the concentration camp of art that Stalinism established in
the Soviet Union and the repressive, destructive character of various
theories of so-called “Socialist Realism” and “Proletarian Culture,”
which had limiting and damaging consequences for artists and
filmmakers around the world. A quite legitimate reaction took place
against the lack of spontaneity, the lack of unhampered artistic
freedom, associated with even genuine social realist trends after the
Second World War. All of this has hampered more serious treatment of
life.
But the terror today against being associated with picturing social
life, or taking some sort of a social stand, of speaking openly and
frankly about the existing social order! This has to be addressed. It
is genuinely debilitating. Where is the disgust, the derision, the
scorn artists of an earlier day were unafraid to heap on bourgeois
society?
Of course many things come into play, but if a figure in the film
industry in the US today dares to make a comment about the Iraq war or
some other atrocity, he or she then has to apologize for the next six
weeks in the media, and genuflect before ‘American democracy’ and
reassure the media that he or she really does believe the US is the
greatest country on earth—it’s repugnant, and it can’t go on. It
blocks a penetrating view of things.
Benjamin Péret, the French surrealist (and Trotskyist for a time),
used to spit every time he passed a priest or a nun on the street. We
have no reason to imitate that sort of behavior, but greater
disrespect for nation, president, king or queen, and church would be
entirely appropriate—we encourage every ounce of politically coherent
disrespect for the bourgeois order and its institutions, we attempt to
incite it and build it up.
Prescriptions and writing to order, even with the best of intentions,
kill art—no one with any brains or sensitivity would suggest or put up
with such a situation. But if art is not about the biggest human
problems—and not simply the petty concerns of a relative handful
attempting to come to terms with their anxieties and self-doubts, or
worse, grappling with career moves and vaguely “finding themselves”—
than what is it?
Those who speak about the ‘purely artistic’ or the ‘purely formal’ are
talking through their hats. Those phrases have no meaning: the artist
is not an empty machine for producing form and the spectator/reader/
viewer is not an empty machine for consuming it. They are both social
creatures, living in, shaped by and responding to definite social and
historical circumstances. Those who base themselves primarily or
exclusively on the “transhistorical,” that is to say, on elementary
physiological and psychological conditions largely unrelated to the
qualities of the here and now, are making an enormous mistake.
Art is not a product in its most striking features of the lowest
common denominator, but of what makes life what it is as a social
phenomenon, and human nature what it is as the ensemble of social
relations. Otherwise, there would be no change in art and we would be
doing the same thing the old Greeks or the Elizabethans did, and this
is clearly not the case. There are problems that are specific to us,
as much as there are constants in life which make it possible for to
us to feel and learn from art works of past ages. Past artists did not
become enduring by setting out to do self-consciously “timeless” work,
but by penetrating their own circumstances so deeply that they raised
certain problems and representations above the immediate—and that is
the responsibility of the filmmaker or artist in the present
circumstances.
In the work of an Orson Welles or a Luchino Visconti, for example, one
encounters an enormous seriousness about the historical moment, the
social dynamics, the complexity of social relations, as well as an
utter commitment to the truth about the individual, about human
behavior—a tracing out of the relations between the social and the
individual in a vivid and convincing, lifelike manner. These are films
made from life, not from schemas, but made with real social and
historical knowledge.
Social circumstances have shaped the current difficulties. We do not
hold the individual artist responsible. As much as possible, we stay
away from denouncing individual figures. These are objective problems.
What have the film writers and directors seen? What do they know about
life, social struggle, mass movement, opposition?
The struggle for artistic truth is difficult under all circumstances.
It demands everything, for the important artist it poses itself as a
life-and-death issue. Today’s filmmakers, instead, for the most part,
have careers. Much of this will come to be seen as a curse, a burden.
One has to feel considerable optimism. Neither society nor filmmaking
starts from zero. The history of both is lodged in the present moment.
It has to be studied, extracted, worked through, as part of the
process of coming to terms artistically with our times, our problems.
A great challenge has to be wedding the explosive new technologies,
which are capable of the most astonishing imagery, the rapid forms of
communication, the dynamics and the refinement of artistic devices
brought into being in recent decades, with a far richer social and
historical understanding. Important art is not created by accident,
you do not stumble on it. As Hegel suggests, it does not come to the
artist in his or her sleep. The unconscious and non-rational play a
greater part in art than in science, but they are not the only
elements. The artist needs to know something important, in order to
feel and think more deeply.
Along these lines, with artists having lost much of the oppositional
characteristics that were more widespread earlier in the past century,
the role of Marxism, Trotskyism, is much more substantial in our
period. We are called on to shed light on the general course of
development and assist the artists with the great problems of artistic
and historical perspective. This is what we have dedicated ourselves
to at the World Socialist Web Site.
AF: Thank you, Tony, for David Walsh's lecture. I have often found The
World Socialist movie reviews to be the best ones at the IMDb, but I
had not realized they still made 'em like Walsh anymore. Although his
discussions of the ideological schisms become tedious for me (granting
that many men and women died for them), he has much to say which is
relevant. I certainly agree that the broader (radical?) critique of
what is happening to Western Society is often removed (if contemplated
at all) from today's films. That leaves the field to the Glenn Beck's,
who actually use the form and methods of 1930's popular art to spin
crazy right-wing myths for today on radio and television.
I particularly liked Walsh's recognition of MAD MEN, and of course,
Orson Welles. Thanks, indeed, Tony.
TW: Yes, there are times when wsws.org. and Walsh can be a little
rigid at some time but they have the best site that considers issues
of culture which is also part of the SEP manifesto. If you negotiate
through their site you will find interviews with Robin Wood, Jose
McBride, reynold Humphries and others as well as some good critical
reviews.